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Live Video: Happyness at Pickathon, Logging Road Sessions

12/29/2015

Jim Beckmann

photo by Amber Knecht

Pickathon's 2015 Fall Season continues. Each week, the rustically set, Portland-area festival is running an ambitious program of four new episodes every week through February 2016. Through twelve individual channels of content, you can experience this one-of-a-kind festival in the most intimate of ways... you'll go, On The Farm, up to The Pumphouse, across to The Slab, out to The Woods Stage, into The Galaxy Barn, and to so many other unique locations where the magic of Pickathon happens.

KEXP is proud to take part in this series. On every fourth Thursday of each month, we present the Logging Road Sessions, featuring twelve exclusive performances captured by the KEXP crew deep in the woods of the festival grounds, with artists including JD McPherson, Rodrigo Amarante, Edna Vazquez, Jackson Boone, Little Freddie King and Ty Segall with Cory Hanson.

For our latest episode, we present London indie pop trio Happyness, whose fun, fuzzy debut, Weird Little Birthday, with all its lo-fi sound, jangly guitars, atmospheric keyboards, sardonic lyrics and catchy hooks, reminded listeners of '90s slacker-rockers like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Sparkehorse, in the best of ways. Finding themselves equally at home deep in the woods on the Logging Road at Pickathon, Happyness opted to perform an appropriately stripped down cover of Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You", serenading the tree frogs, squirrels and other low-canopy critters. Watch this exclusive version recorded by KEXP at Pickathon:

When Julia Holter sings "Can I feel you?" on "Feel You", it's more of a question of capability than one of permission, recalling a feeling of faint familiarity mixed with a lingering inquisitiveness. That gap between existing in a moment and fully grasping it is where the songs on Have You In My ...